The Ice Harvest

This movie has a lot of talent behind it: Richard Russo and Robert
Benton on the screenplay, Harold Ramis directing. And a couple of
solid leading men in Billy Bob Thornton and John Cusack.
Although this movie is funny in parts, don't go in expecting
a wacky laff riot. The comedy is as dark as … it's very dark, OK?
And it's mainly a film noir, with all the violence, deception,
cynicism, and betrayal that incurs.

Thornton and Cusack play a couple guys on the outskirts of organized
crime in Wichita, Kansas. They get the bright idea to rip off a couple
million from the local mob boss, and that's a done deal right at the
movie's start. But (for some reason) they can't leave town right away,
and the rest of the movie describes Cusack's increasingly convoluted
efforts to escape. Bodies start piling up about halfway through.

The DVD extras include a funny outtake where Billy Bob slips into
his Karl voice from Sling Blade. Also there's a pretentious
filmed conversation between Benton, Russo, and the author of the
novel on which the screenplay's based, Scott Phillips. So I found
out that a brief bit where Oliver Platt drunkenly talks about What It
Means To Be A Man In America, wasn't actually meant
to reflect his stupid self-absorbtion; Russo apparently put it into
the script in all earnest seriousness. Here I thought it was one of
the jokes.

I found myself wondering afterwards: is it credible that they're lugging
around over $2 million in currency in a medium-size bag?
If it's entirely in $100 bills, that's
probably doable: extrapolating from this
page, such a boodle would weigh between 40-50 pounds. This
one roughly concurs.

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